Binary star

"There's no such thing as stars, Lea." My older sister and I sit on the shaggy carpet in my room. “Yes, there are. I saw a picture once.” I insist. “They’re beautiful.” “Okay, two things.” My sister Sara says. “One, they’re not real. That photograph was obviously forged. Two, even if they did exist, they are not beautiful. My ancient mythology teacher said that people believe they were giant balls of fire in the sky that would burn things down on Earth.” “They were what gave it light!” I say…

Expect to see celestial fireworks with this year’s Orionid Meteor Shower. Every year as the Earth cruises past an expanse of space littered with the remains of Halley’s Comet, the skies are lit with fast moving beams of light. NASA announced that the shower will begin on Wednesday and continue on till Thursday at dawn. The Time Earth is Closest to Halley’s Comet Debris Stream The best time for viewing will be on Thursday just before dawn, when the shower will reach its peak and it’ll be…

The Sun is far from fully understood and today the two biggest questions related to the Sun is the reason for the high temperature in the corona and how to explain the sunspot cycle \cite{PB}. The Sun is far from fully understood and today the two biggest questions related to the Sun is the reason for the high temperature in the corona and how to explain the sunspot cycle \cite{PB}. The Sun is far from fully understood and today the two biggest questions related to the Sun is the reason for the…

interferometers. Discuss major discoveries that were possible after detection of radio waves from space and how they changed our understanding of Universe. Astronomy is all about increasing our understandings about our Universe through observing objects like stars, galaxies and other bodies which exist outside Earth’s atmosphere. Astronomers make observations of these celestial phenomena by collecting electromagnetic radiation. Optical telescopes e.g. the Hubble Space Telescope collect light…

Is it possible for a star to burn cold? The answer is not as simple as you may think; while all sars burn hot, there are some cold enough to touch (if you survive the vacuum of space). In 2011, NASA’s satellite WISE discovered six Y-Dwarf stars burning as cold as ice, not even forty light years away from our own sun. This type of star is often referred to as a Brown Dwarf, or a failed star. There are three types of Brown Dwarfs; L-Dwarf, T-Dwarf, and Y-Dwarf, the Y-Dwarf being the coldest.…

in Greek mythology. Orion is made up of seven main stars that make something of an 'hourglass' shape, with four stars making a rectangle-like shape; Betelgeuse and Bellatrix making up his 'shoulders', and Saiph and Rigel making up his 'feet'. This rectangle is then tethered in at the middle by three stars to finish off the hourglass shape and act as Orion's 'belt'; these stars are named Mintaka, Alnilam and Alnitak. There are of course other stars that make up other aspects such as a sword, a…

Everything, Features, Intelligence By Jeff Sorensen You may have heard in the past few days that the NASA’s Kepler space telescope found that KIC 8462852 (an F-type main-sequence star located in the constellation Cygnus approximately 454 parsecs (1,480 ly) from Earth) noticed that lighting events observed at the star seemed very odd over the past few years. The dimming events happened so much so that scientists figured that it was too much to be caused by a planet. How scientists generally…

On the photosphere of the Sun it can be observed groups of dark spots. These dark spots are called sunspots and are temporarily, during from a few days to a few months. Sunspots are observed as dark compared to the surrounding areas because of the low temperature compared to the rest of the photosphere. The reduced temperature at the sunspots is due to high magnetic fields that counteract the convection preventing hotter material to reach the surface.\par The sunspots can be seen with the naked…

Stars are complex and giant balls of matter that have many things to understand about. Stars are born of gas and dust and have a life cycle based on their original mass. All stars start out in their main sequence, but the first difference between the mass of stars is when they stop producing energy. The low-mass stars become giant, and the high-mass stars become super giant. For low-mass, the star then becomes a planetary nebula, then finally a white dwarf. High-mass stars become a supernova, a…

NASA has recently discovered a new planet Yelger in the Andromeda Galaxy. It is the right distance from the sun to support life. It is the same size and mass as Earth. It takes 700 Earth days to revolve around the sun(360 on Earth), and takes 20 Earth hours to rotate around its axis(24 on Earth). It’s temperatures are about the same as on Earth, and has a tilt of 45º. It’s moon is the same distance away from Earth but it twice the mass and size. Because Yelger takes 20 hours to rotate on it’s…